In ways that the Indian media has made quite safe to foresee, 2018 is set to be a predictable year for political stories. What would become clear in the coming months is that 2018 wouldn’t be about 2018; it would definitely be about 2019.
In a country offering the electoral platter as the staple diet of political journalism, it doesn’t even warrant sticking one’s neck out to predict that 2018 would be consumed in anticipating 2019 – in playing usherer to the year of general elections. In all likelihood, the year would be wasted in serving subtexts to the epic.
That’s the dominant sense of a political event with which Indian media sees the penultimate year in the life of democratic India. Events as the leitmotif, beating the dour texture of chronicling political banality, seem to have developed as a response of modernity to the need of seeing mass experience as spectacle. As if a different measure evolved in the modern world to express boredom of non-events and excitement of events, Winston Churchill once remarked that in his younger days a senior British politician told him, “Winston, nothing really happens.” Churchill goes on to observe – “since then nothing has stopped happening”.
The last week of the last year witnessed how the fate of 2018 had been already sealed. In electoral arithmetic, there is already talk of how state Assembly elections in eight states would set the tone for 2019, particularly in the bellwether states of Karnataka down south, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in central India and Rajasthan in the north-west. The dominant Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), however, would first seek a foothold in the north-east earlier this year as Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura and Nagaland go for election. The temptation to interpret these polls as a curtain raiser to 2019 is likely to be too strong to focus on them as important elections for the respective states themselves.
Empirically, there is no recent evidence to suggest definite links between state polls’ outcome and the Lok Sabha polls’ tally, though a case for momentum can’t be underestimated. In 2004, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government lost power at the Centre despite clinching victories in the 2003 Assembly polls in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, while the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance managed to retain power at the Centre in 2009 despite adverse results in the 2008 Assembly polls in key states. That, however, is a weak deterrent against political reporting and punditry analysing these polls in the light of the Lok Sabha showdown.
While cliché about “good politics, bad economics” – and its vice-versa depending on which side of the critical divide you are – marks policy analysis in dull (read non-penultimate years) too, the itch would get irresistible this year as the finance minister would present the Union Budget next month. The media pitch would be quite predictable – how electoral populism has been balanced with financial prudence and visionary policies.
Foreign policy and diplomacy, too, will be analysed with the electoral lens. So, upping the ante against Pakistan, recalibration of West Asia policy or jingoistic jibes at China are all likely to get an electoral explanation. Foreign relations’ impact with federal dimensions, like that with Bangladesh and Nepal, would carry considerable heft too. That’s something that has no recorded case of being a factor in poll outcomes, except the decisive 1971 military victory catapulting Indira Gandhi to cult status.
All this can’t rule out the unending cycle of coalition-building and alliance-hunting as a sub-beat of political stories in the year. All feelers, bonhomie and estrangement among leaders and parties would certainly have a 2019 key for decoding. 2018 can sulk for its assigned role of a match-maker or even the villainous avatar of deal-breaker.
So, bereft of big ticket electoral spectacle or a major game changing political spectacle, is 2018 in itself too dull? In an age of click-away news and 24-hour television, has the political narrative got compressed to act as a run-up to five-yearly electoral exercises?
For all the flourish of Churchillian anecdote, a happening is an addiction for the contemporary media, and non-happening is an absolute nightmare.
The basic anxiety in the political imagination of the Indian media is somewhat philosophical. For the 24-hour chronicler, a day always has to mean a lot, or at least, something. It can’t accept the nothingness of a day and it can’t engage with stillness. There is an innate fear in the news media – the fear of a non-event. These feared things may be issues in people’s lives, but not events for political stories.
Personalities in a political society are power-seekers or accumulators with a face to hinge a story on. Their words, demagogy, antics and idiosyncrasies constitute a media event in itself. So does election tourism of the hinterland by fly-by-night journos. But the seminal issues of body politic have a banal presence throughout the five years separating one election from another. So, if an election is an evaluation of the incumbent government, you will be drawn to a few issues by melancholic voices and know-all gloomy punditry or the fawning awe and frothing rage about one-liners, screen presence, foibles and goof-ups of major players of the electoral ring.
As we set our gaze at the political landscape of 2018, the habitual cheater in the media is already on the electoral-tinder, seeking a date with 2019. It will be showing you the side glances it’s stealing of the year that matters to it – the year of power confirmation or reset.
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